R I P O S T E
You cannot strike. Only return.
A free 3D browser game where you have no attack. Blaster bolts come at you; put your energy sword in their path and they fly back at whoever fired them. A lightsaber-style deflection game built with three.js and WebGL 2.
No install, no account, nothing to download. Desktop and mobile.
Twelve seconds from the trailer. Click it for the full 87, with sound.
The idea
Every action game hands you a weapon. This one hands you an answer.
The orbs fire. A ring closes on the spot where each bolt will land. Have the blade there and the bolt turns around. Swing through it hard and it is a riposte: it goes back at double strength. That is the whole verb. Everything else in the game is built to make that one moment feel good.
How it plays
- Three guard. A bolt that gets through costs one. Clear a bout and one comes back.
- Tempo. Every return fills it. When it is full, time bends and each return echoes to a second target.
- Five blades. Azure, Verdant, Violet, Ember, Blanc.
- Ranks. Novice to Légende. Your best score is kept, and a run in progress survives closing the tab.
- It does not end. Bouts get faster and denser until you fall. Then you look at your rank and press Try again.
The masters
Every fourth bout, one of them comes down out of the eclipse. Then they come back harder.
Ways to hold the blade
| How |
|---|
| Mouse / touch | Your pointer or finger is a point on the blade; the hilt trails behind it, so the blade leans the way you move. |
| Your phone as the saber | On the opening page choose Use your phone as the saber, scan the code, and hold the phone like a hilt. The blade follows the phone's long axis, so the grip does not matter. In menus the phone turns into a remote. |
| Gamepad | A stick aims, A confirms and sheathes, B goes back, Start pauses, the d-pad moves through menus. |
| DualSense motion | Settings → Controls → Enable (Chrome or Edge). Experimental. |
| Keyboard | Space sheathes and ignites · Esc pauses · M mutes · F fullscreen · arrows or WASD and Enter in menus |
The phone link is peer to peer. Only where the phone points, button presses and haptic cues cross it.
Install it
It is a web app you can install. Use Install app on the opening page, or your browser's own install option. On iPhone or iPad: Share, then Add to Home Screen. Once installed it opens fullscreen and works offline.
Under the hood
| |
|---|
| Picture | three.js on WebGL 2. The court, the orbs, the hilt and every texture are generated in code. HDR bloom, a planar reflection for the flooded floor, rain, lightning, and a lens pass for shockwaves and film grain. |
| Sound effects | All synthesized live with the Web Audio API: the hum follows the blade's speed, every deflection climbs a scale with your streak. |
| Score | Adaptive. The game's state picks the piece; a smoothed intensity value brings its low, mid and high layers in and out; synthesized drums lock to the battle music's own beat. |
| Phone link | WebRTC through PeerJS, paired with a QR code. |
| Build | Vite. No framework. The only asset files are the music and one font. |
Design decisions and the things that went wrong along the way are in notes.md.
The trailer is the game filming itself
There is no screen recording in the trailer. A dev-only director (src/dev/trailer.js) steps the real game one frame at a time with scripted cameras and saves each frame, so it is a true 60 fps on any machine. While it runs, every sound the game asks for is written to a tape; the tape is then replayed through the game's own audio engine offline, so the picture and the sound are the same events.
Run it yourself
npm install
npm run dev
npm run build
Credits
Made by Amaan Syed at Dawnlight Labs, written with Claude (Fable 5.2).
Score. Built from four orchestral pieces by Luis_Humanoide, used under the Pixabay Content License and edited into loops (public/audio):
These audio files are not covered by this repository's code licence; they remain under the Pixabay Content License and must not be redistributed on their own.
Type. Azonix is used for the Dawnlight wordmark. Cinzel is used under the SIL Open Font License.
Opening sequence. The Dawnlight mark is Dawnlight Labs' own. The pixel critter on the "Built with Claude" card is a hand-drawn nod to Claude's mascot; this is not an Anthropic product and is not endorsed by Anthropic.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by any film or game franchise.
